“Leaders become great not because of their power but, because of their ability to empower others”. The session on Psychology of Leadership empowered us with leadership traits and values to get us step up to be examples by a leader herself, Dr.Mary Cherian. The session started off with the story of Mahabharata with Krishna as the leader. By end of this discussion we learnt leadership is a quality of mindfulness and observance. We learnt leadership can be seen in two different perspectives, Resonant Leader and a Dissonant Leader. We were helped to tap the resonant personality in us to use our dissonant traits to our advantage.

A leader should have hope, vision, compassion, mindfulness and playfulness, we learnt!

A true leader has the confidence to stand alone, the courage to make decisions and compassion to listen to the needs of others. He doesn’t set out to be a leader. But becomes one by the equality of his actions and the integrity of his intend. She brought up a quote by Mary Angelo that says “I have learned that people will forget what you said, People will forget what you did, but people will never forget how we made them feel” which every leader should do. This let us into a deep introspection of how far are we in the journey to leadership.

Do you believe that the actions you do and the traits you follow are related to biological networks? Yeah! Some of the parts of our body is receptive to this kind of actions. Mirror Neural Networks allows us to mimic the actions of others. A hemodynamic sympathetic network allows us to tune into others emotions. This happens in minutes but its effects lasts for a very long time. We realised how one cannot not influence and the importance of influencing others and getting influenced in the right way. As a part of the training we had to draft a project to give solutions to a problem around us. The solutions were to be arrived at keeping our values and wisdom as central.

Getting over fear, strengthening the inner power, transformation thinking, cause and effect thinking, disruptive thinking are some of the important aspects that we as a group have started thinking as a serious step towards fine tuning our leadership personality.

This session definitely added tremendous clarity to idea of being an influential leader.